#sun-eater

That moment when your date asks if you've read the "I don't know the title but I've heard it described as the Anakin Skywalker if he was right series" books and you respond "see, I'd say the protagonist is more Obi-Wan flavoured but I know exactly the one you mean"

I always like it when space fantasy remembers a solar system is 3D. "We're going below the ecliptic" or "we have three fleets approaching on an attack vector from above the solar plane", yummy.

An interesting element of reading space fantasy that isn't Star Wars is the way it reveals the unexplored hinterlands of the franchise. Things like the strangeness of the Extrasolarian culture, how alien one kind of humans can be to another to say nothing of the actual xenobites, and the discomfort which often goes with a meeting of cultures, and the frightening scale of the cosmos. Which isn't to say that Star Wars never goes to those places, but it makes it quite striking how often venturing to another planet in SW is effectively just going to another town.